Latest Blog Posts

Counter Strike version 1.3 was the first video game that I played online in any capacity. In my high school years, I was a Nintendo devotee, which afforded the bare minimum of online gaming experiences. Though I owned Phantasy Star Online: Episodes I & II for the Nintendo Gamecube, the $10-a-month charge to play online was too steep for my part-time, $7 an hour job. So when a friend told me to buy Half-Life in order to play alongside him and millions of others in Counter Strike for free, I was sold.

To this day, I have never played more than 30 minutes of the original Half-Life. After settling into the competitive, online playing field of Counter Strike, I found all other functions of the game superfluous. But Counter Strike is unique, and not only because it revolutionized the first-person shooter. It was a successful online multiplayer experience ostensibly without a single-player accompaniment.

Many years ago there was a contentious debate concerning where video games got their meaning from. The debate was broken up into two camps: the narratologists, those that believed that a game’s meaning came from its story, and the ludologists, those that believed that a game’s meaning came from its mechanics. Then, it was thought to be somewhere in the middle. Now most agree that a game’s meaning comes not from a single element but from all of its elements interacting with one another. These are called a game’s dynamics.

I talked about the meaning in Driver: San Francisco before as emphasized by the games narrative elements and worked to establish a deeper meaning derived from the synthesis of those elements with the game’s mechanics. This worked when “reading” the game in hindsight, but in looking at Driver: San Francisco during play, we see a different process at work.

This is a weird episode. Because while all three of our podcast regulars appreciate Arkham City on some level, boy, do we all have some criticism to level at this sequel to what many feel was one of the best games of 2009.

Minimaps can be helpful, but for some games (or most games, for me personally) they can be too helpful. Since a mini-map usually gives you more information about your surrounding than the surroundings themselves, I usually find myself navigating a world using the mini-map exclusively. This first became apparent as I played through Final Fantasy X, the first Final Fantasy game to have 3D environments. I’m sure they looked incredible, other people seemed to think so, but I never really noticed because I spent most of the time staring at the mini-map when I ran around each level. The word could be confusing, paths split into multiple parts and all of them looked the same. Whereas, the mini-map was a simple top-down view that stripped away all of that beautiful, confusing graphical detail.

Recently I wrote an article for another website entitled The Problem With the Legend of Zelda. The problem, in a nutshell, is that since Ocarina every Zelda game has been essentially the same and the only time that the series is interesting anymore is when it breaks from form. Unsurprisingly the article was met with vehement disgust, but one of the recurring counterarguments in response to it was that Zelda could not succeed as a business venture if it were to change too radically.

That smacks of absurdly mixed priorities (whether it’s my priorities or the general gaming audience’s priorities, I can’t say). To me, a great game is an artistic accomplishment that ought to earn as much as it costs to make; anything more should be treated as a bonus, not an objective. But are games really works of art or are they commercial products? These aren’t mutually exclusive concepts, but it still isn’t clear which force dominates the production of games.